Were you writing for 3e publication or organized play where others were running the same material? If so, I could understand, but not for a home game. At a home game, nobody else needs to see your NPC stats. Just give them what you think is necessary. Close enough is good. The players don't need to be shown the levels, classes, PrCs or templates you give NPCs. For all they know, the NPC has some kind of unique racial variant or unique template applied.
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New System Deal Breakers
- Thread starter Retreater
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Were you writing for 3e publication or organized play where others were running the same material? If so, I could understand, but not for a home game. At a home game, nobody else needs to see your NPC stats. Just give them what you think is necessary. Close enough is good. The players don't need to be shown the levels, classes, PrCs or templates you give NPCs. For all they know, the NPC has some kind of unique racial variant or unique template applied.
Tequila Sunrise
Adventurer
QFT.
In theory, I wouldn't mind working my way up from Average Joe. And maybe there are games that handle that well. But D&D for the most part doesn't. Average Joes in D&D always seem to be incomplete or incompetent in some way.
A 1st level knight can't afford his shining armor. (Can't afford it until 2nd or 3rd level.)
A 1st level thief can't pick a lock to save his life. (Or can't do other thiefly things to save his life.)
A 1st level rogue is a complete dufus in melee. (Can't pay the Weapon Finesse feat tax until 3rd level.)
A 1st level spell slinger can only sling spells one or two rounds per day. (Can't afford to drop that cross bow until mid-levels.)
Maybe 4e has spoiled me, but this Average Joe incompetence has become a deal-breaker for me. If an Average Joe is just Joe Badass with a few numbers rolled back though, no problem!
Last edited:
Ycore Rixle
First Post
Good thread idea. I wouldn't call these dealbreakers for me. With the right group I'm happy to play just about any RPG. But some pet peeves:
1) Anything encouraging individual xp for "roleplay."
2) Anything that has inconsistent world physics, for example, games where diagonal grid movement is the same as horizontal grid movement, or where an item's functioning depends on meta-game ideas such as "in-combat vs. out-of-combat."
3) Cascading stat-->derived stat-->skill systems assuming, which is almost always the case, that a) they're way too long, picky, fiddly, and detailed, and b) they are coupled to combat systems that allow the top-tier stat to be changed in combat, necessitating a recalculation of everything else further on down the chain. Ugh. So not fun.
4) Games that claim to be about X and then devote more than 80% of the rulebook to Y.
5) Character creation as a game session. I know a lot of people like this, but it's not my cup of tea. During my time at the table, I want to play. And I want to play an adventure game, not a character-making game.
6) Games where the setting is clearly wearing an "Immune to Rules" bubble shield. I mean, if cure disease is 100% effective and easily mechanically available, then I don't want to see a plague even mentioned once, not one single time, ever. If earthquake magic is easy to get, I don't want to see medieval castles (and by the way, if I had to choose, I choose castles - let's make magic hard to get.)
And now for my BIGGEST PET PEEVES OF ALL TIME IN RPGs. You can tell they're big because I put it in all caps.
1) Any book published in this century that includes a "What is a roleplaying game?" section. Stop it. We know what one is. I don't need to open up my Fallout New Vegas box and read a paragraph on "What is a computer game?" Egg McMuffins were invented after D&D. I don't need a paragraph from McDonald's asking me "What is an Egg McMuffin?"
2) RPGs that can't get map scale and demographic scale right. It's so irritating to look at a map of a world that is supposedly medieval and see that the populations are far too small and spread out to be similar to medieval Earth. Or to look at a wilderness map and see distances that just do not match with implied travel times and population densities in the text.
Shameless self-plug: Check out my Spellbound Kingdoms game. Not every attack meets more than one defense roll, but some do. Despite that, it is blazing fast. Far faster than other games that claim to be fast (*cough* SW *cough*).
1) Anything encouraging individual xp for "roleplay."
2) Anything that has inconsistent world physics, for example, games where diagonal grid movement is the same as horizontal grid movement, or where an item's functioning depends on meta-game ideas such as "in-combat vs. out-of-combat."
3) Cascading stat-->derived stat-->skill systems assuming, which is almost always the case, that a) they're way too long, picky, fiddly, and detailed, and b) they are coupled to combat systems that allow the top-tier stat to be changed in combat, necessitating a recalculation of everything else further on down the chain. Ugh. So not fun.
4) Games that claim to be about X and then devote more than 80% of the rulebook to Y.
5) Character creation as a game session. I know a lot of people like this, but it's not my cup of tea. During my time at the table, I want to play. And I want to play an adventure game, not a character-making game.
6) Games where the setting is clearly wearing an "Immune to Rules" bubble shield. I mean, if cure disease is 100% effective and easily mechanically available, then I don't want to see a plague even mentioned once, not one single time, ever. If earthquake magic is easy to get, I don't want to see medieval castles (and by the way, if I had to choose, I choose castles - let's make magic hard to get.)
And now for my BIGGEST PET PEEVES OF ALL TIME IN RPGs. You can tell they're big because I put it in all caps.
1) Any book published in this century that includes a "What is a roleplaying game?" section. Stop it. We know what one is. I don't need to open up my Fallout New Vegas box and read a paragraph on "What is a computer game?" Egg McMuffins were invented after D&D. I don't need a paragraph from McDonald's asking me "What is an Egg McMuffin?"
2) RPGs that can't get map scale and demographic scale right. It's so irritating to look at a map of a world that is supposedly medieval and see that the populations are far too small and spread out to be similar to medieval Earth. Or to look at a wilderness map and see distances that just do not match with implied travel times and population densities in the text.
Shameless self-plug: Check out my Spellbound Kingdoms game. Not every attack meets more than one defense roll, but some do. Despite that, it is blazing fast. Far faster than other games that claim to be fast (*cough* SW *cough*).
Stormonu
NeoGrognard
I guess for me one of my bigger dealbreakers is rulesets that don't have prebuilt foes. I'm afraid I'm short on time and spoiled by D&D's catalog of enemies it's built over the years. If the rulebook can't include a section with some premade foes, if I've got to build them all (and use PC rules), I'm not going to bother with the game.
Another dealbreakers are pure point-buy systems. I'm not talking like where just ability scores are set by point buy, but also abilities and whatnot are set via point buy (games such as 2E's Player Option & oWoD) - especially if disadvantages and advantages have different point costs; it's far too easy to abuse such systems and "do the math" to tweak every single advantage out of the game. I'm a casual DM, and I don't want to see my games turn into math theorems on character design.
To a lesser extent, if the base game isn't a single book, I'll probably pass (D&D is the only one I let get away with this). It's not that I don't mind buying supplements, but these days there's no reason to be carrying 30 lbs. of books around for a simple game.
Another dealbreakers are pure point-buy systems. I'm not talking like where just ability scores are set by point buy, but also abilities and whatnot are set via point buy (games such as 2E's Player Option & oWoD) - especially if disadvantages and advantages have different point costs; it's far too easy to abuse such systems and "do the math" to tweak every single advantage out of the game. I'm a casual DM, and I don't want to see my games turn into math theorems on character design.
To a lesser extent, if the base game isn't a single book, I'll probably pass (D&D is the only one I let get away with this). It's not that I don't mind buying supplements, but these days there's no reason to be carrying 30 lbs. of books around for a simple game.
Well if you are using the NWoD as your core system you're safe as it's under 230 pages, but if you add Vamp, Werewolf, mage or Changeling to the mix, you're well past the 300 page mark. WW went from OWoD's general system of aim for 7, use these to change difficulty to having more +/- lists than d20 ever had. Then add in the sake for the sake of change issues I mentioned earlier. The new Changeling is the only part of the NWoD I have any interest in b/c old Changeling was broken in bad ways and needed corrected severely.
I enjoyed the fact that Human was the only crossover between the PHB and Monte's books as far as races and classes went. It covered all the traditional kinda tropes, but in different ways. The Donaldson influence on Monte's books was pretty strong and everyone had symbols of what they were. Magister's staves, etc. I hated Donaldson's novels, but the world he imagined was a pretty cool one.
Ptolus is for you my friend
The Brick is amazing hehThis has been kind of a solved problem since the late '90s when people started putting caps on how many disadvantages you could select for your character. (Mechanically limiting people to using the system as intended.)
This includes Savage Worlds. I haven't played it much to see if they've got the caps in the right place, but glancing through my copy of the rulebook it seems like it would be very difficult to create a deliberately gimped character. And there's certainly no systemic motivation for it (as there would be under GURPS, for example).
I'm with you 100% on this one. I'll tolerate the to-hit roll being an opposed check, but the kind of "cascade checks" (roll to dodge, roll to block, roll to resist, spend a fate point anywhere in that sequence to roll again) is a shocking time-killer.
Wik
First Post
Oo! This game sounds fun. While I don't really have too many "Deal breakers", there are things I dislike in a system.
1. "Build Heavy". If the book has a hundred feats and eight classes, okay, I can deal with that. But if it has five hundred feats and sixteen classes, no thanks. I looked at GURPS for all of twenty seconds before I realized, with all of its modifiable traits, advantages, and disadvantages, that it is not for me. Why? Because I run games, and when systems like this are played, I wind up seeing two or three PCs that are amazing, one or two that are about par for the course, and maybe one or two that are completely useless.
And I have to spend the entire game trying to engage uber PCs while watching the weakling PCs fight at the edges of the encounter. And I hate having to game the system just to challenge my PCs. I realized 4e wasn't for me when I realized even a natural 20 wouldn't hit one of the party rogues - but the same monster would hit the other party rogue on a 10+. I hate that.
2. Fixed Progression. I don't really care one way or another whether a game is class-based. But I dislike games where almost all character classes mean nothing after character creation, or where you're "locked in" from character creation. I always hated seeing people make "20 level builds" in 3e, for example.
There needs to be a way for characters to gain new abilities that they couldn't predict they'd need at character creation. Though, I'm going to list an exception to my own rule - if the game is rules-light, or PCs have a limited range of inputs into their character, I will waive this rule, as "character growth" becomes hardwired into the game in other ways.
3. "Dark". I like dark games, but I dislike how "dark" is interpreted in most RPGs, because it always comes off as this sort of super gothy crap that makes me think I'm supposed to be sitting in a dark room listening to cutter music and complaining about the price of eyeliner. And a lot of the "dark" is just over the top and silly: "oh! This villain uses aborted fetuses that he charges with the necromantic energies of his mother's soul to create fetus grenades... which he uses to blow up orphanages so he can use the power to create an army of ressurected serial killers who..."
Paizo has a bit of this in their mechanics and flavour - the witch has a power that lets her eat children, for example, and there's a lot of supervillain stuff in the Alchemist class. Not a fan, personally.
4. Assumed character role. If the game assumes PCs are of one particular group, I get annoyed sometimes. Usually if that assumption is rather tight. Hey, you know what? I don't want to BE a vampire. Or an arthurian knight. Or a superspy.
5. Tight Classes, broad world. Games where the character classes are very "tight" in describing a role... and there are only a few of them. Gimme broad character classes that can describe many specific roles, or a few tightly-defined character classes that fit in a very tightly-defined world. But if I'm playing in a sci-fi universe, your game needs more than a pilot, marine, and sniper class.
On a related note, I'm not a fan of games that can only really tell one type of story.
6. Non random PC Gen. Not a deal breaker, but I kind of like having some aspects of your character be random. It opens up play a bit, and breaks people out of always playing the same character.
7. "Hero to Zero". I'm not a fan of PCs starting out as complete losers, and then progressing to awesome demi-god status. I prefer games with broader power curves, if only because this allows new PCs to be introduced with zero experience points.
8. Equipment Reliance. Not a fan of any game where the PCs' gear is a huge factor. Even in games where the setting makes PC gear choices important (Shadowrun, for example), I am just not a fan.
9. PC Mechanical Control. I do not like any game where the Players have the ability or expectation to always say something is true. I do not like games where PCs can have powers that are not able to be countered by a GM, and the Players have the expectation that they can circumvent "rule zero".
10. Specific Worlds, but Vague Play: Games that were obviously designed as settings first and foremost, and games second. I don't like worlds that basically have setting restrictions that get in the way of play, or worlds that read better than they play. And I am not a fan of games that set out how to create characters, how to create an adventure, how skills work, how combat works, how the setting works... and then doesn't tell you what the characters actually DO.
I remember playing Shadowrun 2e and having NO idea that "Shadowruns" were criminal in nature. And Mechwarrior was fun for about an hour, until we realized the setting was designed in such a way that we had no idea what our characters could do outside of the mech that was at all interesting. And don't even get me started on Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay...
11. Lovecraftian: I love HP Lovecraft. We even have the same birthday. But these days, Lovecraft has kind of become a sellword. And when I see something that "draws upon the works of H.P. Lovecraft for inspiration", I run for the hills. About the only RPG I want to see that is Lovecraftian is Call of Cthulu. And a few D&D monsters.
12. Hit Location Systems. Never found one I liked. Always been a pain in the butt. Ditto for called shots.
13. Critical Fumbles. Unless they're very simple, and minor in effect - but generally, they lead to deadpanery which is just a PITA.
14. Clunkiness. Using THAC0 instead of BAB is a very good example (attack tables make sense, but if you want to adapt THAC0 as your base, you may as well just go to the BAB route). Likewise, if you run a percentile system, and your base score is, say, 53%, and you get a -25% penalty, actually writing the game to expect the player to subtract 25 from 53 to figure out what he needs to roll (psst.... 28 or under), I hate your game. You should write it so that players know they need to roll BETWEEN 25 and 53 for success.
And yet so many games don't do this.
15. Big numbers. Hate games with big numbers. Buckets of dice? Fine, but only if I don't need to add the results. I hate seeing "1d20+43" and then seeing "8d8+23 damage". Seriously. 1d20+6, 2d8+1 damage is about as high as I want to go.
16. Interrupts. I am not a fan of the premise, because it leads to all the players and GMs talking over one another to trigger powers. And, again, a certain type of expectation in play.
1. "Build Heavy". If the book has a hundred feats and eight classes, okay, I can deal with that. But if it has five hundred feats and sixteen classes, no thanks. I looked at GURPS for all of twenty seconds before I realized, with all of its modifiable traits, advantages, and disadvantages, that it is not for me. Why? Because I run games, and when systems like this are played, I wind up seeing two or three PCs that are amazing, one or two that are about par for the course, and maybe one or two that are completely useless.
And I have to spend the entire game trying to engage uber PCs while watching the weakling PCs fight at the edges of the encounter. And I hate having to game the system just to challenge my PCs. I realized 4e wasn't for me when I realized even a natural 20 wouldn't hit one of the party rogues - but the same monster would hit the other party rogue on a 10+. I hate that.
2. Fixed Progression. I don't really care one way or another whether a game is class-based. But I dislike games where almost all character classes mean nothing after character creation, or where you're "locked in" from character creation. I always hated seeing people make "20 level builds" in 3e, for example.
There needs to be a way for characters to gain new abilities that they couldn't predict they'd need at character creation. Though, I'm going to list an exception to my own rule - if the game is rules-light, or PCs have a limited range of inputs into their character, I will waive this rule, as "character growth" becomes hardwired into the game in other ways.
3. "Dark". I like dark games, but I dislike how "dark" is interpreted in most RPGs, because it always comes off as this sort of super gothy crap that makes me think I'm supposed to be sitting in a dark room listening to cutter music and complaining about the price of eyeliner. And a lot of the "dark" is just over the top and silly: "oh! This villain uses aborted fetuses that he charges with the necromantic energies of his mother's soul to create fetus grenades... which he uses to blow up orphanages so he can use the power to create an army of ressurected serial killers who..."
Paizo has a bit of this in their mechanics and flavour - the witch has a power that lets her eat children, for example, and there's a lot of supervillain stuff in the Alchemist class. Not a fan, personally.
4. Assumed character role. If the game assumes PCs are of one particular group, I get annoyed sometimes. Usually if that assumption is rather tight. Hey, you know what? I don't want to BE a vampire. Or an arthurian knight. Or a superspy.
5. Tight Classes, broad world. Games where the character classes are very "tight" in describing a role... and there are only a few of them. Gimme broad character classes that can describe many specific roles, or a few tightly-defined character classes that fit in a very tightly-defined world. But if I'm playing in a sci-fi universe, your game needs more than a pilot, marine, and sniper class.
On a related note, I'm not a fan of games that can only really tell one type of story.
6. Non random PC Gen. Not a deal breaker, but I kind of like having some aspects of your character be random. It opens up play a bit, and breaks people out of always playing the same character.
7. "Hero to Zero". I'm not a fan of PCs starting out as complete losers, and then progressing to awesome demi-god status. I prefer games with broader power curves, if only because this allows new PCs to be introduced with zero experience points.
8. Equipment Reliance. Not a fan of any game where the PCs' gear is a huge factor. Even in games where the setting makes PC gear choices important (Shadowrun, for example), I am just not a fan.
9. PC Mechanical Control. I do not like any game where the Players have the ability or expectation to always say something is true. I do not like games where PCs can have powers that are not able to be countered by a GM, and the Players have the expectation that they can circumvent "rule zero".
10. Specific Worlds, but Vague Play: Games that were obviously designed as settings first and foremost, and games second. I don't like worlds that basically have setting restrictions that get in the way of play, or worlds that read better than they play. And I am not a fan of games that set out how to create characters, how to create an adventure, how skills work, how combat works, how the setting works... and then doesn't tell you what the characters actually DO.
I remember playing Shadowrun 2e and having NO idea that "Shadowruns" were criminal in nature. And Mechwarrior was fun for about an hour, until we realized the setting was designed in such a way that we had no idea what our characters could do outside of the mech that was at all interesting. And don't even get me started on Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay...
11. Lovecraftian: I love HP Lovecraft. We even have the same birthday. But these days, Lovecraft has kind of become a sellword. And when I see something that "draws upon the works of H.P. Lovecraft for inspiration", I run for the hills. About the only RPG I want to see that is Lovecraftian is Call of Cthulu. And a few D&D monsters.
12. Hit Location Systems. Never found one I liked. Always been a pain in the butt. Ditto for called shots.
13. Critical Fumbles. Unless they're very simple, and minor in effect - but generally, they lead to deadpanery which is just a PITA.
14. Clunkiness. Using THAC0 instead of BAB is a very good example (attack tables make sense, but if you want to adapt THAC0 as your base, you may as well just go to the BAB route). Likewise, if you run a percentile system, and your base score is, say, 53%, and you get a -25% penalty, actually writing the game to expect the player to subtract 25 from 53 to figure out what he needs to roll (psst.... 28 or under), I hate your game. You should write it so that players know they need to roll BETWEEN 25 and 53 for success.
And yet so many games don't do this.
15. Big numbers. Hate games with big numbers. Buckets of dice? Fine, but only if I don't need to add the results. I hate seeing "1d20+43" and then seeing "8d8+23 damage". Seriously. 1d20+6, 2d8+1 damage is about as high as I want to go.
16. Interrupts. I am not a fan of the premise, because it leads to all the players and GMs talking over one another to trigger powers. And, again, a certain type of expectation in play.
Gundark
Explorer
Yes you could do that. However I am of the opinion that if you have to hand wave how things work just to make it playable, then maybe you should reconsider the game your playing.
MarkB
Legend
No, I don't think I've ever built the same type of character twice in a row. I love coming up with new character backstories, and likewise enjoy exploring a variety of possible character types within the system's mechanics.
But when I come up with a character concept, I want to be able to build that concept, and not have it wildly altered by random factors in the character generation system.
Lanefan
Victoria Rules
Y're welcome.Thanks, Lanefan, you bring up some good points and counterpoints.
Agreed. I don't like such systems either; though a DM who occasionally gives an ExP bonus for exceptionally good roleplaying is just fine.
Agreed again. In my case, though, I'm not roleplaying coolness to get a mechanical reward, I'm roleplaying coolness because my character is cool, dammit.
Keep in mind you're also playing to the other players at the table, to entertain them as well. Sure there's no mechanical reward, but I've found that if one person really gets into the RP then others tend to follow; and that alone can be reward enough.
Lan-"entertain and be entertained, and the rest will fall into place"-efan
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